There is a deepening sense of fear as population loss accelerates in rural America. The decline of small-town life is expected to be a looming topic in the presidential election.
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America’s rural population began contracting about a decade ago, according to statistics drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend.
According to a recent Agriculture Department estimate, the rural population did rebound by 0.25 percent from 2020 to 2022 as some families decamped from urban areas during the pandemic.
But demographers say they are still evaluating whether that trend will continue, and if so, where. Pennsylvania has been particularly afflicted. Job losses in the manufacturing and energy industries that began in the 1980s prompted many younger families to relocate to Sun Belt states. The relocations helped fuel population surges in places like Texas and Georgia. But here, two-thirds of the state’s 67 counties have experienced a drop in population in recent years.
Remote work.
Build homes in the echoes of cities instead of gentrifying shit holes.
Repurpose the corporate offices into affordable housing to fix the growing homelessness problems.
Create less car dependent infrastructure
Make more high density areas car free, and build affordable housing over the parking areas.
Subsidize farms if they use green tech. Subsidize them more if they’re smaller to reincitiveize small farms.
Abolish any ability for any corporation from owning any land not zoned for corporate use. Corporations may not own homes.
Did I mention remote work?
Sadly, if you can remotely work from rural America, you can remotely work from rural India.
I’ve worked with India teams in 5 companies. Always bad. we need to rehire Americans to manage/oversight or redo. Ends up costing more. The code and website teams complaints never end but c level Don’t care.
End up bad, but for the first couple of quarters that “rock star” MBA has created huge short term profits. And is that what really matters in business these days…
There are plenty of remote work jobs that are hiring globally now, not just the US or India. There are entire companies that are basically 100% ephemeral. Yes, it sucks for US workers that people in other countries are in the same job sandbox, but the jobs also exist. AI won’t change this either, you still need a person that knows the AI is belching out dogshit code, it’ll likely just reduce the number of code monkey jobs.
the more subsidies, the more transparent EVERYTHING about their operation has to be
